● I’m not sure how
to talk about this first item without sounding all clickbaity, but what
happened in a New York appellate court late last week really did play out
almost like the climactic scene in a Hollywood movie. It was oral argument in
the latest in a string of cases concerning the New York City family police
agency harassing survivors of domestic violence and their children. Fortunately, it’s all on video. I have a blog post about the case,
with a link to the video.
● New York State’s
highest court is sending a similar message. I’ve often written that, in much of
the country, families would get about as much “representation” from a cardboard
cut-out in a three-piece suit as they get from the overloaded court-appointed
lawyers who may meet them for the first time five minutes before the court
hearing. That can happen even when it’s a hearing to terminate children’s
rights to their parents (a more accurate description of the stakes than “termination
of parental rights”). The Imprint reports on a case
in which the New York State Court of Appeals said that’s not good enough.
Perhaps most
notably, when a lawyer defending the termination tried to play the bonding card,
the court didn’t buy it. From the story:
“There is no
question that it is very important and imperative that these cases be resolved
in a speedy fashion,” [Judge] Troutman said during the appeal proceedings. “But
we cannot throw the Constitution in the garbage with respect to people’s rights
in order to get there.”
● One hopes the
message all these judges are sending will reach all across the nation, or at
least across New York, including to Rochester, where, writing in the Rochester Beacon,
a mother describes what happened when she fought for a better education for her
son, and the school retaliated by calling the family police agency:
As a Black
parent, I do not feel safe asking for the support I need. I fear I will be met
with accusations and racialized surveillance. For Jeremiah, he becomes very
anxious when asked personal questions—especially from those in authority
positions. He fears threats of being removed from his environment. The reality
is, we were both traumatized by our interactions with CPS.
● Study after study
keeps showing that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes fare
better even than children alleged to be comparably maltreated but placed in
foster care. Most recently, there was
that Swedish study showing that, by age 20, the foster children were more than
four times more likely to have died. But there’s an even more fundamental
question: Why have we allowed foster-care apologists to reverse the burden of
proof? My column in The Imprint: Safer
Compared to What? Foster care apologists set an incredibly low bar — and still
can’t clear it
● Remember the
expose of horrible conditions in residential treatment
in Arizona and Kentucky and Tennessee and Indiana and Utah and Iowa and Oklahoma and Rhode Island and Washington
State and Arkansas and New York and Connecticut, and Idaho?
Now,
thanks to excellent reporting from The Marshall Project – Cleveland, add Ohio. In the follow-up story, in which various officials shoveling
children into the institution tell us how shocked – shocked! -- they are, a
spokesperson for metropolitan Cleveland says that now, after all the abuse has
been exposed, and they need to find someplace to put all those children,
“reunification also is a priority.”
In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All
Directions:
In 2003, Dewey Sloan, then the chief juvenile
prosecutor in an Iowa county where Native American children were in foster care
at a rate seven times higher than the rate for white children told
the Des Moines Register, "I don't think there's
anything in any of these cases that points to something positive about Indian
culture, except the culture of drugs and the culture of poverty and the culture
of abuse."
Five years later, the
Iowa Capital Dispatch reports, Sloan’s office got a judge to
terminate the rights of a family of Native American children to live with their
mother. Here’s what happened next, according to a lawsuit filed by one of the
children, now an adult:
In 2009, when [Mikalla Starr] Winkel was 4 years old, she
and two of her siblings were placed in the foster home of Norman and Cammie
Winkel of Sioux City – a couple who had no connection to the Santee Sioux
Nation or any other Native American community.
According to the lawsuit, at the time of the foster-home
placement Norman Winkel was a former prison inmate who “had an extensive
drug-related criminal history with five drug convictions, including a felony
for which he received a 25-year prison sentence.”
In 2010, Winkel was legally adopted by the couple. The
lawsuit alleges that while Mikalla lived in the home, Norman Winkel “began to
exhibit grooming behaviors toward Mikalla,” and then, as she matured, the
“grooming escalated to sexual assault, including fondling, mutual touching, and
sexual assault in the foster home.” The alleged sexual abuse “continued for
multiple years,” according to the lawsuit.
